If you are living in the EU and you buy meat from a supermarket, this meat will be from vegan feed animals.
Since the BSE crisis(Mad Cow Disease) in the late 90s it is forbidden to feed animal protein to the majority of farm animals like pigs, cows, sheep, chickens and turkeys in the EU. It is only allowed for fish and other predators.
The industrial animal foods on the market are all vegan and based on pea, wheat, lupin or soy protein. They where enriched with lab produced amino acids and vitamins, to secure the health of the animals.
The breeding works well and humanity should be already dead, if this feeders would do harm to the animals or reduce their fertility. They don’t harm the animals or their fertility at all.
There is no reason why primates like humans should not do well on a vegan diet with supplements like other omnivores like pigs or chickens. The food for rats and mice in the animal testing labs is also vegan based and they do well with it.
If it would harm their offspring, this would be a big problem for the animal testing industry.
Humans are descended from primates that ate rough plant matter(leaves), sometimes they hunted other small primates, insects and game animals. With the conquest of the grassland, they evolved to a more meat, root and grain based diet, those things are more energy rich and easier to digest, that reduced the size of their digestive tract over time.
I was vegetarian and vegan some years in my life as I was young, I never had any malnutrition, but I always adhered to the recommendations by doctors about those lifestyles.
The real problem is that you can live on a vegetarian diet with eggs and milk products without any harm, but this produces male baby animals that have no use. You don’t need roosters for eggs, no bulls and bucks for milk, but they will be born. In the past bulls where castrated to work as ox on the fields, but they where replaced by tractors. So why don’t eat them?
On a vegan diet you need a factory to produce vitamin b12 and amino acids to ensure a healthy diet, but in a modern country this is much more efficient than raising animals.
But when you live on a farm and have your own piece of land like me, or you live in a development country, raising animals is the better way.
Veganismin Germany is mostly practiced by two political groups: The far left and the far right. Some few people are interested because of health benefits or because they have a disease like gout, metabolic syndrome or kidney stones.
For the left it is associated with animal rights and anti-speciesism, this is an ideology which compares animals to humans in a sense of their lives value. They want to forbid people to eat meat. It is a duty for a leftist not to harm animals, because they are a marginalized minority and are oppressed by humanity. They are against every form of breeding, selling and raising animals, like the radical animals rights organization PETA.
For the right it is associated with spiritual growth and strength, some Nazi leaders where also vegetarians, because they had greater compassion for animals then for humans. On the spiritual side it is believed that only the Untermensch needs meat. The higher a human being is spiritually evolved, the lesser it needs food. In the end he only needs light from the sun and is a Sonnenmensch(Sun Man) There where cases where adult people fasted to death that where linked to spiritual cults all over the world.
In German vegetarian means Vegetarier/Veget-Arier. One could say the Vegetable Aryan.
From this ideology, the cases of children and babies died from vegan diets arose. They believe, that they don’t need the nutrients that are recommended to practice a healthy vegan diet and only eat natural, unprocessed food. But they don’t contain all the needed nutrients for humans/omnivores.
My personal reason for becoming vegetarian and vegan in my youth was curiosity and interest for Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. There where also much media propaganda about the health benefits. 20 years later there seem to be still some benefits for a meat reduced or vegetarian diet when it comes to some diseases when one is looking at actual studies. Lesser uric acid, lesser cholesterol, lesser colon cancer, lesser overall heart disease.
I am not vegetarian or vegan anymore, because of my lifestyle. I breed, sell and slaughter animals and I don’t see any reason to stop this, this is also part of the cultural life in my region and part of social activities.